Voyage to the Heart of Matter, a popup book for physics geeks

Voyage to the Heart of Matter, a popup book that lets you construct a scale …

During a recent press event at Brookhaven National Lab, we had a sneak glimpse of a rather unusual product: a popup book for adults. Entitled Voyage to the Heart of Matter, the book focuses on the ATLAS detector at CERN's LHC particle accelerator. Last week, the New York Academy of Science hosted an event to celebrate its release on the US market, complete with a panel discussion moderated by Alan Alda. The book will go on sale later this month, but those in attendance were able to both purchase a copy, and get an update on what's new at the LHC (if you don't care about the book, you can scroll to the bottom for the update).

Voyage was made by CERN's Emma Sanders, who worked with Anton Radevsky, a man who knows his paper but who normally applies his skills to children's books; both were in attendance in New York. Radevsky said he's got a good feel for whether a given 3D object can be flattened down, so he set some limits on what ideas could and could not make it into the final product. For Sanders, who does outreach for CERN, the keys were accuracy and telling the story of how the LHC works and why we've built it.

Even so, the book's production required some feedback and refinement. Sanders said that their initial idea for displaying the evolution of the universe was "too spiky," and had to be revised after feedback from some cosmologists. There was also a winnowing down of potential contents; Sanders said she used online discussion groups to get some ideas on what should and should not make the cut.

Voyage covers a lot of ground in just four major popups, in part by adding some secondary materials on the sides. The first page provides some sense of the scale of the LHC while giving a basic outline of the hardware needed to smash protons together at roughly light speed. The page is detailed enough to show the point where protons start down a path that takes them through several smaller accelerators and into the LHC itself.

The second page shows the access shafts and the ATLAS detector, describing how the its components were carefully lowered down the shafts and put together with painstaking precision, and mentions a bit about the data collection challenge posed by the high rate of collisions.

ATLAS pops up from its underground location, with detector and access shafts sized to scale. The side popup shows people in the ATLAS control room.

That's followed by the centerpiece: a multipart reconstruction of ATLAS itself. The popup model is so detailed that there's an envelope inside with extra parts that can be pieced together into a complete, multilayered model that won't fold back down unless you disassemble it. Four side popups provide details on the hardware components: silicon detectors, straw tube trackers, calorimeters, and muon detectors. This is not likely to be something you'll setup and take down repeatedly—once you put it together, you're going to want to keep it that way if possible.

The detector popup is a microcosm of the LHC: big, complex, and very difficult to put together.

The final page is perhaps one of the most compelling popups, as it explains all the topics the LHC is intended to shed light on. The central popup is centered on the big bang, and expands out to the galaxies we see today. Four key stages in its expansion are numbered, and the side panels explain what the significance of each is, and how the LHC may shed light on the nature of mass and the existence of dark matter.

The Universe pops up to the present day, with information on the first atoms (lower left) and dark matter (upper right).

Considering just how little text there is, the book does a remarkable job explaining both the physics and the hardware. Still, it's necessarily limited, and should be viewed as only a starting point for learning about the LHC (it's also focused exclusively on ATLAS, and there are three other detectors).

The popups themselves are all relevant, but they work (as popups) to varying degrees. Some are visually fantastic, and tell a compelling story. Others fall a bit flat, literally, since some of the hardware involved is nearly two-dimensional. The complexity of the complete ATLAS popup also means that it's not something you casually construct and tear down. This is a popup book for teens and adults that are passionate about the subject.

And, according to the publisher, who was on hand for the introduction, teens and adults seem to be who's buying it. A lot of the audience is comprised of physicists who have purchased the book for themselves, even though they already understand its contents, or for their family and friends. This suggests that they're using it to help explain what they do, or why they keep flying for extended stays in the suburbs of Geneva.

And, in fact, this may be the ideal use of Voyage: as a way to make an explanation of the LHC a bit more concrete and visually compelling.

The latest from CERN

In conjunction with the book's introduction, Columbia University's Michael Tuts, ATLAS' US Operations Program Manager, gave a brief rundown of progress being made at the LHC. Right now, the machine is handed over to the engineering crew during the week, and the detectors are switched off. The staff spends this time working on ways to improve the performance. Currently, the LHC is circulating 13 bunches of protons through the ring, with 2 x 1010 protons per bunch. It's designed to handle five times that number of protons, Tuts said, and they're slowly ramping up to it.

On the weekends, it's physics time. So far, the LHC has produced over 700 million collisions and, thanks to a likely W boson event, is on the verge of having produced the full suite of Standard Model particles. About 40 percent of those particles came from a single weekend (the one just prior to his talk), which shows that the engineering work is paying off. That was the first weekend, Tuts said, that data was coming in fast enough that the software filters that throw out some of the less interesting collisions had to be turned on.

With the intensity of the LHC ramping up, some of the other features in ATLAS will also start to come into play. Brookhaven's Howard Gordon, who I met during the visit to Brookhaven, was also at the event (I was surprised when he sat next to me in the audience, but it turned out that he had the day off from presenting.) Gordon said that they've already had events where two collisions occurred nearly simultaneously within ATLAS, but the detector's huge scale helps ensure that they were physically separated enough that it was possible to figure out what comes from where.

He also said that ATLAS is designed to handle up to 25 collisions per bunch crossing, in part because the liquid argon calorimeters have excellent temporal resolution—on the scale of a nanosecond. So, as the engineers get the hardware to pack ever more protons into a confined space, the detectors will be ready for them.